I enjoy challenging my students to write, revise, and revise again
(and this website includes a large collection
of writing handouts). According to one former student, "Dr.
Jerz will make you a better writer than you think you can be."

Since 1994, I've been married to the former Leigh Anne Gigliotti.
She is working on a Ph.D. in Victorian literature from the University
of
Toronto. We have two children: Peter, born in 1998; and Carolyn, born
in 2002. We are a home-schooling family (though both kids went to
preschool).

For reasons that still elude me, I started the Rainbow
Hector Fan Page as a tribute to the favorite toy of my son Peter
(born in 1998). As of 2009, Peter has moved on to military history and science, but thankfully his sister Carolyn
(born in 2002) is now a Rainbow Hector fan.

Jerz Family Name (A narrative essay on what "Jerz" means.)
"I still had a few minutes while the sausage cooked, so I asked,
"What does my name mean?" The sausage lady averted her eyes and
found something to do underneath the counter. When she emerged
again, her shoulders were shaking, and she was trying to keep a straight
face. I rolled my eyes. Oh no, not again..."

My
great-grandfather John Jerz lived in the back room of this
tiny neighborhood shoe shop, in a Polish neighborhood in
Chicago's West Side.

My grandfather Joseph J. Jerz was a die-cutter in the
auto industry. My father George J. Jerz was born in 1933.
He guesses that this photo dates from 1920.

On the walls of the
Jerz shoe store are mostly posters for "O'Sullivan Heels,"
and "Tite-Edge Rubber Heels." In those days, a shoe
was so well-made that when the heels wore out, you would take
it to a neighborhood shoe shop such as this one, in order to get
a new heel nailed onto the leather sole.

I visited this house with my father
in 1991. The Polish families had long since moved out, and the
neighborhood was mostly Hispanic. The small shop window was still
there, but the store had been converted into a living room.

The boy in the photo is Walter
Jerz, who my father says was the fifth-ranked middle-weight
boxer in the 1930s (and had the same boxing manager as Joe
Louis). Walter was one of my grandfather's six siblings:
after Joseph there were Clara, Walter, Elizabeth, Florence, Raymond,
and Ted.

Ted, the youngest, died in the
summer of 1999. He was not much older than my father, and
the two had recently reconnected. My father found this photo
while going through his Uncle Ted's personal effects.

United
Shoe antitrust suit (1918) against the United
Shoe Machinery Corporation, accused of monopolizing the manufacture
and sale of shoemaking machines. (The court found the company
not guilty. Go figure.)